On finding the energy to create: A resource that offers us power
Reflections on Audre Lorde, and the pursuit of joy and pleasure as power.
Last week, I talked about intimacy as a powerful motivating force for creating new work. I find the desire to connect to be a backbone, in my practice. But when things start to go wrong, and the rejections pile in, I’ve noticed ‘connection’ is not enough to re-motivate. Instead, my instinct is to hide away, retreat, and somehow, look to punish myself for being so embarrassing as to have failed. Does this sound familiar to you?
Intimacy and connection makes the work desirable in the first place, lending it higher purpose. But when the shit hits the fan, I need something more immediate, less risky and less complex than searching for connection. I think of this thing as joy, or even more simply, the basic energy to make anything. My hope is that plain old delight might be enough of the energy-boost I need to get started again, especially when every external signal says don’t bother.
Detractors and drainers
In the last months, I’ve faced quite a lot of setbacks and a lot of painful rejections. Much of this has been delivered without empathy by my rejectors - my industry’s gatekeepers are not known for their consideration or compassion. They also often don’t really understand what’s at stake for the artist themselves. How could they? Here’s Duchamp:
It’s not just about those who judge the work. Some artistic types themselves seem to treat the low mood from fellow artists as a disease they might catch. We’re a superstitious bunch that way. But of course, this is particularly disappointing and isolating in what is already an often highly solitary pursuit. It’s easier just to shut the feelings down, try to numb the pain of rejection, and feel as little as possible, so that all that sadness doesn’t leak out all over the place and scare people off.
In light of this, how on earth do I face yet another blank page? Numbed out, distracted or simply quietly existing, all that’s left to me is stillness. Where on earth will I find the energy even to start? What will fuel me, in this state?
In Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland say:
Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.
Absolutely. And yet, this nourishment can so easily turn to pressure, which is no longer nourishing. When the odds are stacked against you, the next sentence written, the next story completed, the next submission, must be the one that saves it all. It must justify all the hard work, and set me back on the right path. In a pursuit with no guarantees, this kind of pressure is all too much to bear. How can we find that nourishment without fostering a stranglehold before you can really get going?
The Erotic as Power?
In trying to suppress my own emotional turmoil, I refer back to Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic (from Sister Outsider).
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves…
Audre Lorde argued that our society promotes disconnection between the things we experience, and how we feel. A split between what our body knows and our society tells us to believe. That disconnection has meant that emotions, deemed unhelpful or lesser, are subjugated. Logically, if we receive external rejection, this feels like a clear signal that we must stop, retreat, retract and ignore whatever feeling it was that gave rise to our pursuit in the first place. We must fear that ‘yes’ which the world has said ‘no’ to.
Lorde says there is a power to reclaim here. A source of energy. She defines the ‘erotic’ as deep sensation and knowledge:
The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.
She contrasts the erotic with another term - the pornographic:
To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused and the absurd.
It is ‘rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling’, something that she says Western society has devalued. Lorde also characterises this as a deeply feminine and spiritual resource, though this does not discriminate - anyone may access eroticism.
Living life more erotically
Why make the deep act of feeling and trusting our feelings part of the solution?
This is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
As Lorde says here, we don’t want the mere safety of a numbed life. We make art because we want to find that intimacy, the deeper connective tissue, and though society teaches us to treat rejection and failure as worthy of embarrassment and retreat, this goes against the exact reason we put ourselves out there in the first place.
I don’t wish to settle for the ‘merely safe’ because to me, creating things is never safe. The risk is part of the reward. To quote Bayles and Orland again (in Art and Fear):
Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing.
To make the practice of seeking out ‘the erotic’ (as Lorde defines it) more tangible, we might consider….
“…the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person…”
Namely, fostering community (and not letting competition rule).
“…the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy...”
Focusing on the feelings: the delight and joy of a well crafted sentence, colour on the page, a series of pleasing notes sung or played. The smallest increments of joy.
“…[becoming] responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense...”
This means, taking ourselves seriously and learning to trust. After all, Lorde asserts that the statement ‘it feels right to me’ is an acknowledgement of the strength of the erotic as true knowledge. Not to be discounted or passed over. Hearing this, listening to it, comes from building trust with yourself first.
Where to next?
Lorde says:
There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into the sunlight against the body of a woman I love.
All this is power, an energy source that pushes us back into experiences, back into our lives, so that we are present and open to experience. Retreat does not empower us. Trust and deep feeling does. When we are empty, we must refuel. Everything we deeply experience can serve as that fuel. Sitting in the sunlight, sharing a hug, reading a good sentence or sharing a meal - everything we do can give us back the power to start again.
Where could you locate the erotic in your own life? What could it mean to you?
If you want to listen in on Lorde reading out the essay, here’s a video:
Weekly extras and joys to share… 🌊
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
This is my all-time most re-read book. Woolf died when Lorde was barely 7 years old, but there is a connection they share in the way they elevate depth of experience and of feeling, as worthy and valuable to all of us. A quote (very much also related to last week’s edition):
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
And…
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.
Until next week…
Be well,
CCx
such a wonderful read! Thank you, it gave me energy on this Monday afternoon! Hugs from Amsterdam